Freshbooks, the online invoicing and time management application, released an innovative new feature called Report Cards.

This is a really interesting feature that takes advantage of a unique aspect of hosted applications, namely the ability to aggregate data across a network of customers. Putting aside the permissions and security issues that this raises, what this gives SMBs is the ability to benchmark their performance against their peers and do it from within the application they are already using without having to resort to time consuming data upload/download issues.

SMB users have traditionally not had access to these services because of cost, but also because the market research firms tended to aggregate markets at a macro level and that meant that the benchmarks were not reflective of the real world environment the client was in. With Freshbooks a users can see a peer group that is dynamically built to reflect the characteristics that the user determines is relevant, rather than the faceless business analyst they never met.

This is a genuine innovation on several levels and reflects a customer focused approach that this company has become known for. This is also representative of a shift in how we, as an industry, look at SMB markets, which up until now have been viewed as “the thing Intuit does” when in fact these are increasingly sophisticated businesses that have an aggressive attitude to technology but won’t invest heavily in IT.

Tags: Freshbooks, best practices